Ok, so I'm all kinds of bad at this

I had a pretty serious feeling when I started this thing that it would not work out. That type of attitude upon entry into this little plan to write a book in a month probably had a ton to do with its failure, but that's ok.

I spend all day reading the essays of college applicants.

These kids are given the option to discuss a setback they have experienced. I read one somewhile back to which i relate pretty easily. The student said that his setback was that he procrastinated. That's why his grades weren't good.

That is not actually a setback.

You are just Lazy.

I'm just lazy.

I don't like doing things when

I get home from work.

So with this kid in mind and the fact that like him - the kid who has nothing to blame for his academic shortcomings but himself - I have thus far found reasons to not do the things that matter, I intend to buckle down soon.

I wish I could say that

with more conviction.

I will keep you posted. Promise.

And now, I shall write about writing

So, November is National Write a Novel Month.

No one told me.

So I'm making December into Lincoln Moore Writes a Book Month. I decided to do this almost 24 hours ago, so that would officially make this day 2 of my month long journey and I will be tracking my progress for the whole world to see.

The truth is, I don't really publicize this little thing

and I'm really writing to have a record of what I was

doing, so that I can take a look back on it in a few

years.

I already have an idea and an outline figured out, so at this point I have a simple goal to write ten pages a day until I am finished. I'm on day two in the journey and I am sitting at the Caribou at Sheldon and Five Mile at 8 pm.

I have not started yet.

I thought caribou would be ideal for its calm air and comfy seating. Not true. It turns out that all the good chairs are taken and the 'air' I expected is being seriously dampened by the wonderfully patient man who is tutoring an absolute tool directly to my left.

"And why is there a halo around the moon

as opposed to the rainbow we see with the

sun? Do you understa-"

"You know what? I need to make a phone call

really quick."

"I don't understand why that couldn't wait

until after we are done. This is the last

question."

And then I flip my table over and demand a bit more respect for that wonderful wizened old man. Now, I'm out one coke and have accomplished nothing towards this book.

Yes, I got a coke at Caribou.

On to writing. Maybe I will go somewhere else tomorrow.

When I become employed, I boogie

Last time around, I made certain promises. Promises regarding comical videos. Do not be afraid friends. I won't disappoint.

I recently found out that I will become an employee of the University of Michigan and after hearing about the employment opportunity, I immediately decided to go the library to get a DVD, do an homage to Heath Ledger, and do a cartwheel at a fountain. This all happened whilst I was getting down, shaking my tailfeather, backing that thang up and committing general acts of boogying. This is the story of me completing said tasks.

I hope that watching this video brings as much joy as making it brought to my friend Daniel and me in the production.

Daniel

He came from England

to thrill our senses, filming

the wonders he sees.

We made this in about two hours after we both got done with our current jobs as an exponential babysitter and culinary delivery operator. Thanks for watching and again, we hope that you enjoy it.

Sitting on the edge of a job

So my life has been full of sitting about for the past year and moping about employment. I spent an atrocious amount of time looking for work and submitting resumes and applications everywhere that I could find one.

No bites.

My final tally puts me at over 100 attempts to work and no one was interested. I have applied to be a janitor, a barrista, a tree cutter (which given my lankiness and vertical dexterity, I have to assume I would have excelled at) a temp, various secretarial jobs, an English Tutor, and an English Teacher. The company I interviewed with to teach English in Japan was shady.

Caribou Coffee interviewed me twice and then wasn't interested.

Brutal.

One day my dad saw that I was looking particularly dejected in the car. 'Lincoln, you know this has nothing to do with you. You are talented and there is work out there for you. No one can get a job now, especially in Michigan.' I will spare you the rest of the conversation.

The truth was that I had been buying into valuing myself based on my employment status, which meant that I was taking a year long dump on myself. I didn't even know it was happening until that moment.

At the beginning of May I landed a part time job at The Home Depot which helped out some and then mid-June I started working at a day care facility. I'm pulling down about 65 hours right now. So far, I'm managing it. I'm sleepier than usual, I don't last much past midnight these days but that's ok.

Whilst all this is going on, I have gone through the interview process with UMICH for a position in the Admissions Dept and I am waiting to hear back from them. The job would be really great, I would get to brag on my alma mater all day and welcome a whole new class of Wolverines to the Greatest University out there. I WILL do this if I get the job:

Guaranteed. I will tape it and repost the new video.

Remember kid from

10 things I hate about you

watch his film called Brick.

Now I'm going to read The Abolition of Man. Who doesn't need a little CS Lewis on a warm Sunday.

Things I Do Not Understand: Singing and Instumenting Simultaneously

So in the interest of trying to be original (my eternally and rarely accomplished desire) I think that it would be funny to post a blog about things that I don't understand. Most people that throw one of these things up here do it in the interest of voicing their opinion on something that they feel particularly knowledgeable about. This makes them feel smart and lets them find other people who have achieved their same level of mastery in their favorite field. Bloggers would seek this out so that they can avoid conversations with you who make them want to tear off their face when you discuss their passion whatever it may be. Sports, theatre, music, coffee, Jai Alai, I don't know.

Bloggers are a proud and arrogant people.

I can be too.

One thing that I can not do is play a musical instrument well and simultaneously produce non-painful sounds with my voice.

I can sometimes sing.

I can play a hot lick too.

Never together. <----Haiku

Believe me it is not for want of effort. I sit around my living room and play this little tiny guitar that I stole from a friend and try to sing 'Blackbird,' and either one of two things happen. The

guitar part sounds fine, but i then realize that notes I am singing have very little to do with the melody that Paul sang, or I put tremendous effort into nailing that melody down and the sounds of the guitar start moving like a poorly handled sitar. Everything goes wrong.

There is a primary disconnect somewhere between my hands and my voice. I feel like I'm doing this:

But everyone else is doing this:

o well.

The right to be ridiculous is something I hold dear.

U2 said it first.

It was revelatory and I totally buy into it.

Here is some evidence:

This is me and some ladies that decided to reject me. They are laughing about how entirely weak my game was as well as the disturbing patchiness of my facial hair. Another reason for them to laugh is that I was allowing myself to be photographed only in shades of black, white, and

blue. OK, fine, maybe they didn't know that that part was happening but they would have laughed at me anyway.

And now for something slightly different. Lincoln impersonating a young child - this happens frighteningly more frequently than you would expect - who had just that day done his darndest to pull our store's dividers down on it's head.

Clearly, the child was not having a good day, but fortunately Lincoln was there to dive between the child and its impending doom as the big metal pole started to topple.

Uh. Oh.

And this here is one of my most glorious pictures.

Yes, I am in Jerusalem.

Yes, I am playing with a velcro catching mitt.

Why, yes, I did buy it in the market in the Old City.

What's that? Why am I standing that way?

No, I don't have an answer for that.

Just an unfortunate moment for a picture.

Being ridiculous, silly, and absurd is something that is completely essential in my life but from time to time I lose sight of it. I get serious for extended periods of time and somewhere in the I stop dreaming. Alright, that sounds extreme and cliche but I'm speaking in two senses. 1) I stop coming up with grand schemes. I get practical and the minute I become practical I stop getting things done. 2) My sleep is completely empty. I actually stop having dreams. So I was totally pumped the other night when I had a dream, because it had been a quarter year dreamless slump and that is not good for me.

So, the line in the title of this here blog is in U2's song I'll go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight and in the song it goes like this:

Is it true that perfect love casts out all fear?

The right to be ridiculous is something I hold dear.

It's kind of like Yoda's 'fear leads to anger...' proposition but in the opposite direction. Love destroys fear; the lack of fear allows one to be ridiculous. This makes me glad to have people around me who enjoy silliness; people who would rather choose to laugh at something childish than to call it immature.

I'm doing silly things, but I believe in them. This includes writing a script that is completely absurd, but even in this script with its absurdities and quirks there are moments in which something worth doing is being created. The creative process has been really interesting for me. A friend and I have written the majority of the meat of the script and it is only since then that I have had moments of some type of real inspiration. The printed pages are covered now with additions and new lines and wonderful adjustments. For me it's been like going to Yellowstone and not knowing there are geysers. All of a sudden the real show begins. The greatest moments are the ones that I didn't see before.

Be silly today.

You may need to write some hai-

kus. Do it Here, please.

Really though. My friend

Mike Haddad made this great face-

book application.

Have fun with some words.

Write a few dirty poems

then you show your friends.

Learning about credit scores and movie making the hard way

This is not going to be a downer entry. That needs to be said at the outset. 

I am a substitute teacher. This means that from time to time, I sit down in classrooms full of students whom (<--- Bringing it back) I have never met. Today, I have the honor of sitting in on a class that is working on a design project and the teacher left me his computer that has internet access and I can get onto blogger. Gmail is not an option. 

I was simply sitting here when one of the young ladies shouted across the room and demanded that I give her a dollar. I would love to I said, but I'm broke. The class was mystified. I don't think that they had ever believed that someone could be out of college and not have some hard currency on their person. I'm sure most of their parents normally have cash for them. From the information they had about how money works, the only logical conclusion was that I was a big fat ungenerous liar. 

After a few minutes of harassment, I felt the need to defend my status as a man of my word, even if it meant showing everyone in the room that I was in truth a total bum. To my disappointment, they seemed to be more interest in my Burt's Bees and my lucky baseball card (Willie McGee) than the fact that I was a truth teller. You win some and you lose some. 

Anyhow, the job search continues. Get at me if you hear of some amazing opportunity, so that I can take advantage of it. It really doesn't need to be amazing. Homeboy just needs a paycheck.

In other news, my friend Daniel and I have been exploring the bottom rungs of the Detroit film industry together. We were unpaid PA's on a film project shooting down on McNichols earlier this week. We learned a lot and the guys making the movie were really friendly. Because there wasn't anyone else there to help, we got to try a lot of different 'jobs' while we were there. We supervised the script, noted sound and camera times, worked the boom and dressed the set. 

The following day we were extras on a major movie shooting in Dearborn. Big names, lots of people, lots of professionals. It is incredible to me how much footage gets shot every day on these sets when compared with how much actually makes the film. I will leave you with an equation:

An average film shoots for 9 weeks 6 days a week.

An average film in 1.75 hours = 105 minutes

How many minutes are accomplished on an average day?

Organic Cigarettes and Other Signs of the Coming Apocalypse

Hokay so,

I was just flipping through a magazine and saw an ad for American Spirit cigarettes boasting that they have ORGANIC cigarettes. Why why why why why?

Now we arrive at one of the most egregious suspensions of logic that I have seen in a long while. American Spirit advertises its Organic Cigarettes while simultaneously saying that they are not actually healthier in any way. This is actually mandated by a court ruling, which says that in their ads which boldly proclaim their Organic cigarettes they must also put these words:

No additives in our tobacco

does NOT mean a safer cigarette.

Here is an example of someone doing the exact same thing:

I really don't mind tobacco at all. I love me a nice cigar every now and then and when the weather is nice, nothing beats sitting on my porch with a nice pipe and a book. (I'm building up my old man street cred.) I guess what scares me is some magical power that advertisers seem to have over us. We are told over and over that we must purchase and consume organic goods so that we will in turn be healthier and we buy into it so much that someone can run a campaign selling us one of the most deadly products out there and because they slap a big certified organic sticker on it, someone is beating down the door to the nearest liquor store to pick it up. yikes.

Here's one kid who knows something about cig uh rets.

why is today creepier than every other day? Lincoln's fifth question.

for some reason, I am absolutely on edge today. Here are the contributing factors:

caffeine
three dimensional stop motion animation
the looming prospect of grad school
my first adventure in screenwriting.

So, I am sitting in the Caribou at five mile and sheldon right now. The hilarious part about this is that I do not drink coffee, but I applied for a job here a few weeks ago and I feel like if I keep coming in they will think that I am dedicated or something and just give me a job out of a sense of pity. Thus far, no luck. The truly unfortunate thing is that I feel compelled to drink a coffee beverage whenever I'm in here. I mean, could I really show up here and order a coke and sit by myself. That simply wouldn't make sense. My brother and I saw Coraline this afternoon. It was both the coolest 3-d movie I've seen as well as the coolest stop-motion flick. A lot of the time, I feel like when those mediums are used, it isn't a natural outgrowth of the story, but just becomes some kitschy little gimick that advertisers want to force onto a narrative because they believe that it will fill seats i.e. the Home Improvement 3D episode and the stop motion James and the Giant Peach. This however, was great. I was basically sold from the opening credits in which the screen was framed with a type of lace pattern that resembled old footlamps, but instead of just hanging out at the bottom of the screen, wrapped all the way around. It fascinated me. The movie though, IS REALLY CREEPY. If you didn't know that you shouldn't take young children to see Tim Burton flicks, take note. I may have a few nightmares tonight.
After the movie, I went to the library and started doing research for my grad school applications. The whole process just feels like a gigantic mountain to me. It takes up a lot of the space in my head after I think about it and makes it really difficult to focus elsewhere. So, there's a lot to get accomplished there.

And as some of you know, I am taking my first tenuous steps into screenwriting. It's a really fun project for me based on the life and struggles of Luke Haddad. At this point it is kind of following a Waiting for Guffman style arch. It is a lot of fun though because it is a medium that I have never worked in and at times I feel really not up to the challenge because there is so much that I need to start learning about how to make a screenplay that people would be interested in.

So I am doing all of that and right now I'm listening to the first time to U2's new album. they have it streaming on their myspace. How great would it be if this could be another Joshua Tree? Here's hoping. I'm also going down to the D tonight to see Medicine for Melancholy tonight. Given the frenetic, caffeine adjusted state of mind that I am in right now, I think this movie is going to be just what I need.